Conclusion

Beyond textual expressions which chart the entrenchment of social constructionist identity politics in literary studies — and arguably more widely in the humanities and social sciences — lie other relatively intractable, unrecorded, transient, and yet familiarly institutional expressions. The recorded tracings of Theory-‘against Theory’-‘after Theory’ developments, of self-announcements, of textbook and anthology production, of canon debates, constantly emanate from and return within such a diffuse hum of numerous untextualized exchanges and communications and gestures. Ultimately, such untextualized exchanges moderate the everyday life of academic institutional spaces amidst other kinds of institutional spaces and within the broader life of society. So, beyond those textual traces that the previous three chapters are devoted to there is this larger field of everyday institutional expressions, and it may be expected that just as identity politics is entrenched within and structures the disposition of textualized expressions of literary studies, it is so too for untextualized expressions. If identity politics is institutionalized, it is as much within the ebb and flow of the untextualized everyday life of literary studies as within the textualized archive. To try to render this everyday institutional life tractable, to categorize and analyse its nuances, to collect observations about it and systematize them, would be akin to what Geertz described as collecting ‘convergent data’ from a wider range of sources than this study can attend to. This study has attended to a narrowly circumscribed and limited range of observations, drawing on a particular kind of source — but the inferences available from that seem to me to be sufficiently indicative

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Everyday life · Field (mathematics) · Gesture · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Law · Mathematics · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Romani and Gypsy Studies